


how to never stop being sad

by butteriie



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Backstory, Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Headcanon, Minor Character Death, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-12
Updated: 2018-02-12
Packaged: 2019-03-17 05:31:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13652430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/butteriie/pseuds/butteriie
Summary: She was Pigeon Wilson, the crazy gun lady who lived in the woods.No one ever bothered to ask her what her story was. No one cared enough.





	how to never stop being sad

**Author's Note:**

> this was a short backstory write/songfic for the pigeon used by whyispigeonstartingafire.tumblr.com :p

Pigeon Wilson found her head in her hands as she stared down at the most intimidating stack of papers she had seen in a very long time.  
Her desk was a mess.  
She herself was.. a mess.  
Tear stains down the slightly pinkened cheeks of the pale, but freckled, girl. She was a student, a doctor, a scientist. And just hours ago she had found somebody’s life in her hands. She had the chance to prove her worth and she had called herself out as being the only person with a medical license in the room. She may have just gotten it, but she brandished that thing like a sheriff would his badge. But, as it turned, this fire haired girl was more bark than bite.  
The person had overdosed.  
All she needed to do was some simple CPR, but her pre-existing anxiety kicked in at that moment and she had frozen up.  
She let them die.

And here she was, filling out the papers to mark that a patient had fallen dead under her watch.  
So she just kept telling herself it.. wasn’t real.  
Time itself proves that tricking yourself is the most best way to deal with shit you have no control over.

And it was over the months following, as the event really sat in her brain and stomach, that Pigeon let herself become more reclusive.

She barely left her house anymore. She did her tests and studies either on computer or in the haphazardly made in-home lab she had (that was really just the garage reformed). She lived with her parents at the time, and even they barely saw their daughter as she constantly holed herself up in her lab. The only time she really left was to get the mail, she even found herself slipping into bad sleeping habits, lack of food, and lack of water.  
And to match the consistency of the setting, she always had the radio playing, listening to songs and memorizing them not so she could sing along, but to analyze the words over and over until they had no more meaning. She found herself becoming quite the little human dictionary, yet the southern slang that she grew up with was still always first in her vocabulary.

She often found herself getting sick, probably from all the chemicals she inhaled on a daily basis.

And that made her wonder.

What if the person who had died hadn’t died because of the overdose at all, but chemicals rewiring their brain, giving them an unseen illness, and the overdose happening as a result of such?

… People would still rule it the person’s fault, not the illness left untreated.

It was after a year that she finally moved out, getting herself out of the house and back into the world. She got her medical license renewed and she got a house closer to the city.

Life was well… But lonely.

She found herself sitting dormant in these bouts of loneliness. Sprawled out over a bed two big for one skinny girl to have all to herself, holding her phone in her hand as it shone down on her face, the light from the screen being the only point of illumination in her home. A dead silence rang out around her as she just scrolled mindlessly through pages of internet, not really looking for anything in specific. Just.. looking. And the weight of the loneliness felt.. heavy. This is what she had signed herself up for. This is what she wanted. If this was all just in her head, she would have woken up by now, but all she could do for now was sit. Numb. Hoping for just one more glimmer of hope in her life, or perhaps another person to just smile at her and make her feel warm once more.

She went out for coffee four times a week with herself. She followed that for about 2 years.

And no matter what time of day it was, or which coffeeshop she was at, she brought a notebook with her and just wrote. She wrote and wrote and wrote. Some might say she never stopped writing, but that would be an exaggeration. She did stop occasionally, whether it be because she got lost in a coffee cup or because she needed to put her pencil down and think.

And while it was study notes she was writing, she would always tear out a page of her notebook to leave a thank you note with her tip if the waitress was cute.

Besides, it made her feel a little less lonely to see someone smile as she left because she did something nice for them.

It was around this time that the aforementioned illnesses she had started to kick in harder.

She began finding her four times weekly coffee trips becoming.. three times a week. And then two. And then one.  
Then she bought herself a coffee machine.

She was in pain when she moved and she could barely breathe. She didn’t know what she had, and after being a doctor for a small amount of time, she wasn’t interested in going near a hospital again if she had the choice.

So.. she started looking for help in a community of friends.

She knew the truth of the matter was that her life was shit because she deserved it. This was just karma for some unknowing crime she probably committed. She almost found herself numb to the pain of the loneliness and illness, taking up shooting bottles and cans in her backyard as a pastime.

And even though it was here that she stayed and all of her friends knew she was there, none of them visited. Of course they wouldn’t. She knew they didn’t care about it.

She found herself constantly paying for deliveries of everything she needed, and being out of work, this took a lot of her money away from her. She started testing her new medicines on herself to see if something, anything would help her get better.

And that is how she lost her medical license permanently.

She had to move back into her parents’ place, her old bedroom from her teenage years practically untouched, her old lab now used as a storage space for holiday decorations. This was a time she spent mostly curled up in her bed. She ate decently and managed to keep up on water intake, but her personal hygiene and her exercise.. suffered. She lost interest in everything that had once had a vice grip around her throat, holding her in place and making her feel something, whether it be happiness or pressure. She found herself slipping out of reality and into her own little world, not even bothering to fight it. It might have been her life, but in this moment she felt as if she was just backseat driving.

And then, she got sent a box. A huge unlabeled box, typed with a note written in cursive that read a tale about it’s contents containing the medicine she needed to make her better, sent from a doctor friend from a completely different /planet/. Inside the box were months worth of shots and pills. The instructions said to take them together, a shot and a pill each morning and each night for 3 months. And so she started in.

Almost instantly, the same day she took her first one, she was up and walking again. As a matter of fact, she felt almost better than she had ever felt before. Even her mental health seemed to improve with this. It gave her order and peace amongst the chaos of her pained life. She found herself falling in love with the sting of the shot and the feeling of the will going down her throat, finding comfort in just being able to feel /something/ again.

But it was two and a half months in when the bad part of the mysterious medicine she had trusted started to kick in.

Her anxiety and depressive tendencies skyrocketed to an all time high. She found herself bursting into random bouts of limited mobility, sometimes not being able to move at all. She was in a worse constant pain than before. The love and happiness she had felt because of this miracle medicine that seemed a gift from god all slowly faded, consuming her back into the inky void of loneliness she knew once before.

She went a bit.. odd in that period of time. She lost herself, you could say, the person Pigeon was was.. completely different to the person she became. In an attempt to make people think her twitchiness, limping walk, constant anxious and sketchy demeanor, and severe suicidal tendencies seem.. well.. “normal”.. she put on an act.

She no longer needed to find people to help her scare her loneliness away, because when you become the one who scares others away unintentionally, you sorta no longer felt as lonely. There was a sort of silent understanding between her and the world that this was how it should be.

She stopped taking the medicine around this time.

And slowly but surely, things got better. The bad symptoms went away. Mostly. And as an added plus, her illness did still appear to be gone. That helped. A lot. But.. she couldn’t reverse the image she had made for herself. The only people who accepted her back were her parents, but even they wouldn’t let her live in the house again. They had told her it was a bad idea to take medicine without knowledge on it, but she didn’t listen. They did, however, help her out a little.

They gave her back her old stuff, and then gifted her their old camper. After a compromise with some town officials, she permanently parked that thing in a campsite.

That became home

She was Pigeon Wilson, the crazy gun lady who lived in the woods.

 

No one ever bothered to ask her what her story was. No one cared enough.

 

But oddly?

 

She was fine with that.


End file.
